"Postulate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... these facts, assuming the rate of change in the forms of life to have been the same formerly, Lyell concludes that geological phenomena postulate 200,000,000 years at least," [88] "to account for the undoubted facts of geology since life began." [89] On the other hand, mathematical astronomy, [90] on theories which Mr. Laing complains of as wanting the solidity of geological ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... impenetrability, we can thoroughly model not only an elastic solid, and any combination of elastic solids, but so complex and recondite a phenomenon as the passage of polarized light through a magnetic field. But now, with the view of ultimately discarding the postulate of rigidity from all our materials, let us suppose some to be absolutely destitute of rigidity, and to possess merely inertia and incompressibility, and mutual impenetrability with reference to the still remaining rigid matter. With these postulates we can produce a perfect model of mutual action ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... should read the lecture given before the Mannheim German Society, in June, 1784, on the question: 'What can a good permanent theater really effect?' It is an excellent, thoughtful essay, instinct with lofty idealism and at the same time full of sound observation. Setting out from the postulate that the highest aim of all institutions whatsoever is the furtherance of the general happiness, the paper discusses the theater as a public institution of the state. Its claims are examined, and the sphere and manner of its influence discussed, along with those of religion and the laws. Probably ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... surprisingly many, but the changes taking place within our own souls are deeper and likely to surprise us more in the end. Everything has been found untenable. Theories and systems are shaken by the great upheaval. Civilization has become a question instead of a postulate. All human thought is undergoing a process of retrospection, drawn by a desire to find a new and stable beginning. Take down Spencer and Comte or Lecky and Kidd from your bookshelf and try to settle down to a contented contemplation of the sociological tenets of the past. You will fail, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... philosophic Greeks, makes the deity the fount of all existences, causa causans, "what unmoved moves," the beginning and the end. But the myth-makers, deserting any such ideas they may possess, find it necessary, like the child of whom we spoke, to postulate a PLACE for the divine energy to work from, and that place is the earth or the heavens. Then, again, heaven and earth are themselves often regarded in the usual mythical way, as animated, as persons with parts and passions, and finally, among advancing races, as gods. Into this medley of ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... to boys the minister will appeal frankly to manly and heroic qualities. He will advance no dark premise of their natural estrangement from God, but will postulate for all a sonship which is at once a divine challenge to the best that is in them and the guaranty that the best is the normal and the God-intended life. They must qualify for a great campaign under the greatest soul that ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... ignore that authority on which all their subsequent steps depend. If Hegel professes, as he manifestly does, to develop his scheme by reasoning—if he presents successive inferences as necessarily following from certain premises; he implies the postulate that a belief which necessarily follows after certain antecedents is a true belief: and, did an opponent reply to one of his inferences, that, though it was impossible to think the opposite, yet the opposite was ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... referred. Look a man calmly through the very centre of his pupils and ask him for anything with a tone implying entire conviction that he will grant it, and he will very commonly consent to the thing asked, were it to commit hari-kari. The Captain acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend as a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of Batavian origin, I may be permitted to say that my new friend was of the Dutch type, like the Amsterdam galiots, broad in the beam, capacious in the hold, and calculated to carry a heavy cargo rather ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... felt and the rational postulate of God is made, it immediately verifies its practical value in the solution of our deepest problems. A happy illustration of the practical value and verifying evidence of the rational postulate of God has been given ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... conditions of the problem. The paradox of parallels does not contribute much to my pages: its cases are to be found for the most part in geometrical systems, or in notes to them. Most of them consist in the proposal of additional postulates; some are attempts to do without any new postulate. Gen. Perronet Thompson, whose paradoxes are always constructed on much study of previous writers, has collected in the work above named, a budget of attempts, the heads of which are in the Penny and English Cyclopaedias, at "Parallels." He has given thirty instances, selected ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... the Reality—the Noumenon, which we intuitively postulate as behind the phenomena ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... connected with publication. When the first collected edition of the plays appeared, it purported to contain "All His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies." According to the postulate of the Baconians it was edited by the Author, or by Jonson acting for him. It contains several plays which, according to many critics, are not the author's. This, if true, is mysterious, and so is the fact that a few plays ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Revolution was inevitable and indispensable, how was the nation to make the best of it? And how were surrounding nations to make the best of it? This was the true point of view. But Burke never placed himself at such a point. He never conceded the postulate, because, though he knew France better than anybody in England except Arthur Young, he did not know her condition well enough. "Alas!" he said, "they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which has a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... disceptation^; paper war. art of reasoning, logic. process of reasoning, train of reasoning, chain of reasoning; deduction, induction, abduction; synthesis, analysis. argument; case, plaidoyer^, opening; lemma, proposition, terms, premises, postulate, data, starting point, principle; inference &c (judgment) 480. prosyllogism^, syllogism; enthymeme^, sorites^, dilemma, perilepsis^, a priori reasoning, reductio ad absurdum, horns of a dilemma, argumentum ad hominem [Lat.], comprehensive argument; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Sienna have used the language they did use to express their relations to Jesus had they been wives and mothers? Such questions admit of one answer, which is, in its way, decisive. Professor James admits that modern psychology holds as a general postulate "there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition."[2] The 'medical materialist' can ask for no more than this. But this being granted, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... If the postulate be thus admitted, that one mind influencing two bodies, would only involve a diversity of operations, but in reality be one in essence; or otherwise, (as an hypothetical argument, illustrative of truth) if one preeminent mind, or spiritual subsistence, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... it must be admitted, involves a certain assumption, which may be regarded as the fundamental postulate of the organic view of society. It implies that such a fulfilment or full development of personality is practically possible not for one man only but for all members of a community. There must be a line of development open along which each can move in harmony ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... postulate as the cause of X Y Z a transcendent X Y Z—that is, a cause lying external to the sphere; and by referring the former to the latter, he will obtain for X Y X, not certainly a real externality, which is the thing wanted, but a quasi-externality, with which, as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is useless again. As in the mechanistic hypothesis, here again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus understood is only inverted mechanism. It springs from the same postulate, with this sole difference, that in the movement of our finite intellects along successive things, whose successiveness is reduced to a mere appearance, it holds in front of us the light with which it claims to guide us, instead of putting ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... then can any "Adept" attempt to prove the fallacy of much that is predicated in the nebular and solar theories when the only means by which he could successfully prove his position is an appeal to, and the exhibition of, that sixth sense— consciousness which the physicist cannot postulate? Is not ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... in this the budding germ of despotism, and resolved to oppose its growth. The voice of James Otis the younger, a ripe scholar of six-and-thirty, and then the Advocate General of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, first denounced the scheme and declared the great political postulate which became the basis of all subsequent resistance to kingly domination, that "TAXATION, WITHOUT REPRESENTATION, IS TYRANNY." Like the deep and startling tones of an alarm-bell, echoing from hill to hill, his bold eloquence aroused the hearts of thinking men from the Penobscot ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... dependent, heat conditional, electricity and magnetism more or less phenomenal, chemical affinity and molecular force mere modes or correlated forms of motion, and all-pervading life itself a mere postulate of the schools, or at best only the result of the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... to have been seriously perplexed by this assertion of Mr Cobden's; and others, we have heard, not generally disposed to view that gentleman's doctrines with favour, who insist upon it, that, in mere candour, we must grant this particular postulate. "Really," say they, "that cannot be refused him; the law was for the purpose he assigns; its final cause was, as he tells us, to keep up artificially the price of our domestic corn-markets. So far he is right. But his error commences ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... so, if we may venture on a practical suggestion, Assuming that your postulate's indubitably true, And all should be examined—there must yet remain the question, Custodes quis ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... prove effective in a case of double pneumonia, or compound fracture, or malignant tumour, without the assistance of the physician—above all, without "drugs," which are pronounced taboo by Mrs. Eddy; "and that," to quote Mr. Podmore again, "is a postulate which can never be contradicted by experience, for failure can always be {128} ascribed—as it is, in fact, ascribed by the Christian Scientist to-day—to want of faith or 'Science' on the part of the sufferer." Nothing could be more entirely simple or unanswerable: ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight The genitive and ablative to boot: The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right, And in all cases the case absolute! Self-construed, I all other moods decline: Imperative, from nothing we derive us; Yet as a super-postulate of mine, Unconstrued antecedence I assign To X, Y, Z, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... every one, and certain, which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy. 'I have never doubted,' a recent Oxford writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or significance, ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... hand, carries with it, by implication, the belief that the present order of things was brought about suddenly and irrespective of any pre-existent order; and it is important to hold clear ideas as to which of these beliefs is the true one. In the first place, we may postulate that the world had a beginning, and, equally, that the existing terrestrial order had a beginning. However far back we may go, geology does not, and cannot, reach the actual beginning of the world; and we are, therefore, left simply to our own speculations ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... other hand those Irish Nationalists who followed Mr Dillon's lead attacked the new movement with a ferocity that was as stupid as it was criminal. For at least it did not require any unusual degree of political intelligence to postulate that if The Times, Sir Edward Carson, The Northern Whig and other Unionist and Orange bravoes and journals were denouncing the Devolution proposals as "worse than Home Rule," Irish Nationalists should have long hesitated before they joined them in their campaign of destruction ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... the theory of non-Euclidean geometry, Euclid's postulate of parallels being used ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... certain degree adapted to the human nerve and muscle system and to man's possibilities of perception, of attention, of memory, of feeling, and of will. Industrial technique with its restless improvements has always been subordinated to this postulate. Every change which made it possible for the workingman to secure equal effects with smaller effort or to secure greater or better effects with equal effort counted as an economic gain, which was ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... finer ideals and by more beautiful circumstance. He even introduced a contemporary critic of Utopian conditions in the shape of the talkative person, "a conscious Ishmaelite in the world of wit, and in some subtly inexplicable way a most consummate ass." But once we begin to postulate our Utopian villains, the reader's thought is distracted from the contemplation of the heroic which is the cement that binds every stone in the visionary city. In order to change conditions it is necessary to change much in the present cast of human nature. In ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... was undoubtedly auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which—and the rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... come to the belief that the same laws operate throughout the entire Universe, just as they do here on the Earth. This is the Uniformity Postulate. ...
— Unthinkable • Roger Phillips Graham
... there is nothing unreasonable in a miracle which so powerfully contributed to their conquest of Canaan, and we have yet to learn that there is anything unreasonable in the belief that they were the depositaries of revelation. The fundamental postulate of the Old Testament is a supernatural revelation, and that opens the door for any miracle needful for its accomplishment. It is folly to seek to conciliate by minimising the miraculous element. However much may be thrown out to the wolves, they will not cease to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... changed very frequently her point of view. She had been drilled—in her tradition, in her upbringing—to keep her mouth shut. But there were times, she said, when she was so near yielding to the temptation of speaking that afterwards she shuddered to think of those times. You must postulate that what she desired above all things was to keep a shut mouth to the world; to Edward and to the women that he loved. If she spoke ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... Carlyle, that after all the fundamental question between any two human beings is—Can I kill thee, or canst thou kill me? I do not agree that any organised society has ever subsisted upon either of those principles, or that brutality is always present as a fundamental postulate in the relations ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... that 'apologetic' writers refer to such passages as Matt. xiii. 37 (comp. Luke xiii. 34), 'O Jerusalem, Jerusalem ... how often would I have gathered thy children together'? Here the expression 'how often,' it is contended, obliges us to postulate other visits, probably several visits, to Jerusalem, which are not recorded in the Synoptic Gospels themselves. And it may be suggested also that the twice-repeated notice of time in the context of St. Luke, 'I do cures to-day and ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... this postulate, and was curious to hear the Magian's reply; but he could not follow his argument till he ended by saying, rather more emphatically: "You, even, do not deny the physical connection of things; but I know ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... physical assemblage), but in order to make it "tap" there must be somebody to move it: in fact, a "medium." In my view, as soon as the animal subject has been able to understand "numbers"—and this postulate of the new zoopsychology, I repeat, I believe to be indispensable to the whole edifice—the animal finds itself sufficiently in harmony with the master to become capable (in principle) of all ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... possible, endeavours to conceive those things which increase or help the body's power of activity (III. xii.); in other words (III. xii. note), those things which it loves. But conception is helped by those things which postulate the existence of a thing, and contrariwise is hindered by those which exclude the existence of a thing (II. xvii.); therefore the images of things, which postulate the existence of an object of love, help the mind's endeavour to conceive the object of love, in other words (III. xi. note), ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... second position at Kamfers Dam, and placed a second gun there. We had good people in Kimberley who asserted that the gentle Boer knew not how to use a gun; that he considered it so much lumber, an incumbrance. These were apart from the school given to postulate that the farmers had no guns to use. No need to say that both theories were dispelled, by sight as well as by hearing. Much attention was devoted to Otto's Kopje—our most exposed position—and many ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Those who postulate the "perfectly natural" voice, i.e., one that is unconscious of its own art, either presuppose this condition of innate perfection or assume that the simple wish to speak—and its exercise—will be sufficient to overcome ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... animals, whatever they may be, down to the lowest speck of protoplasmic matter in which life can be manifested, a series of gradations, leading from one end of the series to the other, either exists or has existed. Undoubtedly that is a necessary postulate of the doctrine of evolution. But when we look upon living Nature as it is, we find a totally different state of things. We find that animals and plants fall into groups, the different members of which are pretty closely allied together, but which are separated by definite, larger or smaller, breaks, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... "So it presents a dilemma. To resolve it, it is necessary to postulate a Supreme Mind, and to say that all things are just thoughts in God's Mind. That makes us both the same then and there is no ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips
... History has generally to begin with the present, to go back to the past, and to point out the palpable steps by which the past became again and again the present. Evolution, on the contrary, prefers to begin with the distant past, to postulate formations, even if they have left no traces, and to speak of those almost imperceptible changes by which the postulated past became the perceptible present, as not only necessary, but as real. Perhaps the difference is of no importance, but ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... or operative cause (nimitta) of the world, but its material cause as well. The world springs from Brahman by way of modification (pari/n/ama; Sutra 26).—Ramanuja views this adhikara/n/a as specially directed against the Se/s/vara-sa@nkhyas who indeed admit the existence of a highest Lord, but postulate in addition an independent pradhana on which the Lord acts as an ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his pantheism is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise man of Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the postulate of this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and the inner life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his religion. In his youth, in the period of Werther, Ganymede, and ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... origins are lost in mystery. No objection can lie against this postulate about the way in which folkways began, on account of the element of inference in it. All origins are lost in mystery, and it seems vain to hope that from any origin the veil of mystery will ever be raised. We go up the stream of history to the utmost point for which we have ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... He writes:[1] "The postulate with which metaphysical reasoning sets out is that we are primarily conscious only of our sensations—that we certainly know we have these, and that if there be anything beyond these serving as cause for them, it can be known only ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... all be put down to constitutional defects of vision. When he deals with woman he is no longer scrupulously conscientious. We begin to have our suspicions of his uprightness when we find him in his Subjection of Women laying it down as a fundamental postulate that the subjection of woman to man is always morally indefensible. For no upright mind can fail to see that the woman who lives in a condition of financial dependence upon man has no moral claim to unrestricted liberty. The suspicion ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... may recollect the original postulate of my plan. Other travellers have gone, relying on the abundant Caribou, yet saw none, so starved. I relied on no Caribou, I took plenty of groceries, and because I was independent, the Caribou walked into camp nearly every day, and we lived largely on their meat, saving our ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... reviewed, complications analyzed into principles, and knowledge disentangled from opinion. It is not always possible, without a close inspection, to separate the genuine shoots of consequential reasoning, which grow out of some radical postulate, from the branches which art has ingrafted on it. The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... reincarnates into the body of an infant, shortly after birth. But the Statisticalists cannot accept the idea of discarnate consciousness, since they conceive of consciousness purely as a function of the physical brain. So they postulate an unconscious discarnate personality, or, as you put it, one in a somnambulistic state. They have to concede memory to this discarnate personality, since it was by recovery of memories of previous reincarnations that discarnate existence and reincarnation were proven to be facts. So they picture ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... heart for one of her sweet flowers. There were two trains by which He might arrive—one at 4.15, which would get him to Ardingly for tea, the other at 6.45. She was quite determined to see him, but more inflexible than that resolve was the Euclidean postulate that no one in Tilling should think that she had taken any deliberate step to do so. For the present she had disarmed suspicion by the blankness of her indifference as to what might happen on Saturday ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... ultimate achievements of the pagan world. Now Christianity, said he, is the synthesis of whatever is separately excellent in either. It will abate as little as the haughtiest Stoicism of the ideal which it contemplates as the first postulate of true morality; the absolute holiness and purity which it demands are as much raised above the poor performances of actual man, as the absolute wisdom and impeccability of the Stoic. Yet, unlike the ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... not seemly that the World should watch. Hitherto they had toiled in a harbour at which the World did not touch. Knowing naught else, they had come to take their privacy for granted. Now suddenly this precious postulate had been withdrawn. Since wellnigh the whole of the estate was edged by road, the erection of the fence at once cost them seclusion and showed them how dear ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... about the only writer we have who gives us anything of himself. Quite unconsciously, every sentence he writes is saturated with his own identity; he is, then, a man of courage, and—the postulate assumed that we are not speaking of fools—courage in such case springs only from two sources, carelessness of opinion and possession of power. Now no one, of course, can be entirely indifferent to the audience he strives to please; and it would seem, then, that that daring which is the first ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... either member of the proposition is impossible. It is impossible, for no such postulate as inability or faithlessness can be laid ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... developments to the first differentiation of the simplest cell, they followed out the unity of the plan of the organic kingdoms—which hitherto had been maintained only ideally and proclaimed as a philosophic postulate—farther and deeper into the sphere of empiric reality. We must mention, moreover, the great palaeontological discoveries which, from the first foraminifera of the Cambrian formations up to the historical period of man, showed a great progressive scale in the appearance of the organisms ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... perhaps nervous theorizers—who has wavered about the military policy of the country; but there have naturally been some who have found it less easy than they could have foreseen to live up to the sacrifices it has necessitated. Of course there have been such people: one would have had to postulate them if they had not come within one's experience. There have been some to whom it was harder than they imagined to give up a certain way of living, or a certain kind of breakfast-roll; though the French, being fundamentally temperate, are far less the slaves of the luxuries ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... postulates, it never has, and never will, change a postulate. And a religious belief is a system of postulates ... so how can a man fight a native superstition with logic? Or ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... higher prompting than conquest for conquest's sake and mere race glorification. To go far and to endure, it must have behind it an ethical impulse, a sincerely conceived righteousness. But it must be taken into consideration that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies. So be it. The world is whirling faster to-day than ever before. It has gained impetus. Affairs rush ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... those rights inhere in the individual, are part of his existence, and not the gift of any man or aggregation of men. If they were, equality under a despotism might find its justification in the postulate just as well as equality under a republic. Caesarean Democracy could claim like paternity with American Democracy. The assumption, then, that freedom in any of its forms is a privilege conceded by society is utterly unwarrantable, because society itself is a concession from the individual—the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... susceptible of definition and, therefore, relative. The Absolute includes the idea of necessity, which the mind cannot cognize. (2) The Absolute exists for thought only. In this theory the absolute is the unknown x which the human mind is logically compelled to postulate a priori as the only coherent explanation and justification of its thought. (3) The Absolute exists but is unthinkable, because it is an aid to thought which comes into operation, as it were, as a final explanation beyond which thought cannot go. Its existence is shown ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... postulate a congenital abnormality in order to account satisfactorily for at least a large proportion of sexual inverts, wherein does that abnormality consist? Ulrichs explained the matter by saying that in sexual ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "the postulate, George Douglas, the most active of the gang. Let him arise at your call—the claimant of wealth which he does not possess, the partaker of the illustrious blood of Douglas, but which in his veins is sullied with illegitimacy. Paint him the ruthless, the daring, the ambitious—so ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... cannot fail on reflection to perceive, they offer no shadow of argument in support of that 'greatest happiness principle' on which their whole system rests. Commencing with the undeniable postulate that happiness is the sole object of existence, and perceiving that individual happiness alone would be a very misleading object, they proceed to take quietly for granted that the only happiness at ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... must also take note of the nature of the services which the given society requires of its adult members. These services vary in character, and there can be no one kind of education which equally fits the individual to perform efficiently any and every service. To postulate this would be to affirm that there is a kind of experience useful for the realisation indifferently of any and every purpose of adult life, and to affirm that a system of knowledge acquired and organised for the attainment of certain ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... point his sentence and prove his first postulate, Mr. King is obliged not only to dispose of Washington, but to introduce Columbus, who never was imagined in the wildest fantasy to be an American, and to omit Franklin. The omission of itself is fatal to Mr. King's case. Franklin has certainly a "preeminent name." He has, too, "immortal fame," ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... be said with truth that the Bible is a book which reads History, and the perplexities of Man, in the light of one great postulate, viz. that there is a God. The natural sequences, which are now partially explained by scientific discoveries, are in the Bible attributed to God's guidance: and of course there is no contradiction between ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... primordial substance must be considered as self-forming by an inherent intelligence abiding in itself becomes evident from the fact that intelligence is the essential quality of spirit; and if we were to conceive of the primordial substance as something apart from spirit, then we should have to postulate some other power which is neither spirit nor matter, and originates both; but this is only putting the idea of a self-evolving power a step further back and asserting the production of a lower grade of undifferentiated spirit by a higher, ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Himself for the sake of love. We cannot conceive the Sublime with any other principal function than that of love; for love is the deepest and profoundest emotion of the human heart, and, in accordance with the first postulate, must therefore be the soul of the universe. On this point all mystics and all metaphysical ecstatics are agreed; "God is love" is written in the Gospel of St. John. "Love which moves the sun and all the stars," stands at ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... is the planetesimal hypothesis by Chamberlin and Moulton. The energy which these investigators have devoted to formulating and testing this hypothesis, in the light of the principles of mechanics, has been commensurate with the importance of the subject. They postulate that the materials now composing the Sun, planets, and satellites, at one time existed as a spiral nebula, or as a great spiral swarm of discrete particles, each particle in elliptic motion about the central nucleus. The authors go further back and endeavor ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... will remember when Parry suggested that the perception of Good might perhaps be an instinct, you objected that instincts conflict one with another, and that we therefore require another faculty to choose between them. Now it seems to me that your own argument is open to the same objection. You postulate some faculty—which perhaps you might as well call an instinct—and this faculty, as I understand you, in the effort to realize itself, proceeds to discriminate various objects as good. But, now, does this same faculty also know that the Goods ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... assertion is wholly negative. The geologist reasons thus: The more perfect organisms have not been discovered in the earlier strata; therefore, they do not exist in them. When, in a different connection, it suits our author's purpose to throw doubt on the very postulate which is here admitted, he holds the ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... We postulate that pain is one of the phenomena which result from a stimulation to motor action. When a barefoot boy steps on a sharp stone it is important that the injuring contact be released as quickly as possible; and therefore physical injury pain results and impels ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... monde est impitoyable.' Few remember that the dandy's vanity is far different from the crude conceit of the merely handsome man. Dandyism is, after all, one of the decorative arts. A fine ground to work upon is its first postulate. And the dandy cares for his physical endowments only in so far as they are susceptible of fine results. They are just so much to him as to the decorative artist is inilluminate parchment, the form of a white vase or the surface of a wall where ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... ludentis naturae', and the 'verum' will not excuse the 'inverisimile'. But farce dares add the two Dromios, and is justified in so doing by the laws of its end and constitution. In a word, farces commence in a postulate, which ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... points in the same direction. The City was not—could not have been—self-supporting. There is no source of organic material on the planet great enough to support such a city; therefore, foodstuffs must have been imported. On the other hand, it is necessary to postulate some reason for establishing a city on an otherwise barren planet and populating it with an ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... set into vibration, between the electric light and our eyes. That medium scientists call ether, but it is so subtile that no instrument has been devised whereby it may be measured or analyzed and therefore the scientists are without much information concerning it, though forced to postulate its existence. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not find. If any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence. That whole of which our life on earth forms ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... (the Stoic) lays claim; therefore I take it subjectively as an attribute alleged to belong to man. (Perhaps the expression virtue, with which also the made great show, would better mark the characteristic of his school.) The expression of a postulate of pure practical reason might give most occasion to misapprehension in case the reader confounded it with the signification of the postulates in pure mathematics, which carry apodeictic certainty with them. These, however, postulate the possibility of an action, the object ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... but not of God's infliction. For false belief always curses with a reign of discord, which endures until the belief becomes corrected by truth. From the beginning, the human race has vainly sought to postulate an equal and opposite to everything in the realm of both the spiritual and material. It has been hypnotized, obsessed, blinded, by this false zeal. The resultant belief in "dualism" has rendered hate the equal and opposite of Love, evil ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... further. I postulate we would all die for that baby if a locomotive was to trundle up right here and try to handle it. [To the GERMAN] I guess you don't know how good you are. [As the GERMAN is twisting up the ends of his moustache—to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hypothesis of metaphysical teleology, although in a physical sense gratuitous, may be in a psychological sense legitimate. But as against the fundamental position on which alone this argument can rest—viz. the position that the fundamental postulate of Atheism is more inconceivable than is the fundamental postulate of Theism—we have seen two ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... continuing the same. Should you suppose various things in the system changed at once, you can neither judge of the possibility nor the consequences of the changes, having no degree of experience to direct you." Now assuredly this postulate makes the whole question as easy a one as ever metaphysician or naturalist had to solve. For it is no longer—Why did a powerful and benevolent Being create a world in which there is evil—but only—The world being given, how far are its different arrangements consistent with one ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... minute: it would be impossible to prove that life was utterly extinct, when Alice seemed to die, 'as the clock in the distant village tolled one, just before' Ravenswood's experience. We do not, like him, postulate 'a breach in the laws of nature,' only a possible example of a law. The tale was not 'unfolded to the ear,' as the telepathic impact only affected ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... that we must postulate a divine consciousness to account for human consciousness; but, on your theory, how could human consciousness come out of a divine consciousness; and, anyhow, contrary to your implication, we know of no consciousness ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... degrading stain our nature bore: Wearing a shade of every hateful vice, Ingratitude, injustice, selfishness. But I was wrong, for I have traced the stream Back to its fountain in the inmost cave, And found in postulate of purest grain, It's first beginning.—It is not the man, The friend who has obliged us, we would shun, But the conviction which his presence brings, That we have done him wrong:—a sense of grief And shame at our own rash improvidence: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... Simply from the event. It was notoriously the triumphant cause. It was victorious, (victrix causa Deis placuit; sed victa Catoni.) It was the 'victrix causa;' and, as such, simply because it was 'victrix,' it had a right in his eyes to postulate the divine favor as mere matter of necessary interference: whilst, on the other hand, the victa causa, though it seemed to Lucan sanctioned by human virtue in the person of Cato, stood unappealably condemned. This mode of reasoning may strike ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... toiled with unwavering pluck; I've struggled if ever a man did; Infringed every postulate, stuck At nothing,—nay, once, to be candid, I shifted the cadence—designed A fresh but unauthorised fare-well; 'Twas plausible, too, but I find ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... then, against fallacies of contradiction arising from the imperfect correspondence of fact with thought and language, we shall often have to put up with it. Candour and humility having been satisfied by the above acknowledgment of the subtlety of Nature, we may henceforward proceed upon the postulate—that it is possible to use contradictory terms such as cannot both be predicated of the same subject in the same relation, though one of them may be; that, for example, it may be truly said of a man for some years that his hair is black; and, if so, that ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... is an important postulate underlying this theory. It is, that upon each planet the possibilities of development just attain to the margin of the next higher step in mental evolution. That is, that on Mercury the period of brawn develops to the possibility of the period of sense without fully exemplifying it, so in ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... barring orders to the contrary,—which were not given,—each British ship was at its nearest to the enemy as she passed their van, and became more and more distant as she drew to the rear. It would have been impossible to realize more exactly the postulate of the 17th Article of the Fighting Instructions, which in itself voiced the ideal conditions of an advantageous naval position for attack, as conceived by the average officer of the day; and, as though most effectually to demonstrate once for all how that sort of thing would ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... What nature can afford, I shall produce, upon my word; 760 And if she ever gave that boon To man, I'll prove that I have one I mean by postulate illation, When you shall offer just occasion: But since y' have yet deny'd to give 765 My heart, your pris'ner, a reprieve, But made it sink down to my heel, Let that at least your pity feel; And, for the sufferings of your martyr, Give its poor entertainer quarter; ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... bear, carry on; wear; /bellum gerere, to wage war /occupo:, occupa:re, occupa:vi:, occupa:tus, seize, take possession of (occupy) /postulo:, postula:re, postula:vi:, postula:tus, demand (ex-postulate) /recu:so:, recu:sa:re, recu:sa:vi:, recu:sa:tus, refuse /sto:, sta:re, steti:, status, stand /tempto:, tempta:re, tempta:vi:, tempta:tus, try, tempt, test; attempt /teneo:, tene:re, tenui:, ——, keep, ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... of fine weather. (The order of composition, in these things, I may mention, was reversed by the order of publication; the earlier written of the two books having appeared as the later.) Even under the weight of my hero's years I could feel my postulate firm; even under the strain of the difference between those of Madame de Vionnet and those of Chad Newsome, a difference liable to be denounced as shocking, I could still feel it serene. Nothing resisted, nothing betrayed, I seem to make out, in this full and sound sense of the matter; ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... "persistence of force." By this Spencer sometimes means the phenomenal law of conservation of energy, sometimes the metaphysical principle that the quantity of existence is unalterable, sometimes the logical principle that nothing can happen without a reason, sometimes the practical postulate that in the absence of any assignable difference you must call a thing the same. This law is one vast vagueness, of which I can give no clear account; but of his special vaguenesses "mental force" and "social ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... is perverted or destroyed, can be restored and transformed. Christian Ethics, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with the question, By what power can a man achieve the right and do the good? It is not enough to postulate the inherent capacity of man. Experience of human nature shows that there are hostile elements which too often frustrate his natural development. Hence the practical problem which Christian Ethics has to face is, How can the spiritual ideal be made a reality? It regards ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the cellular nature of the body had been demonstrated, it seemed necessary in some instances to postulate a blastema or exudation to account for certain new formations. But the moment I could show the universality of cells—the moment I could show that bone corpuscles were real cells, and that connective tissues contained cells—from that moment ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... however, was fenced by iron bars; and these bars had been to a certain extent eaten through with aqua fortis. The king had succeeded in pushing his head through, and upon that result he relied for his escape; for he connected this trial with the following strange maxim or postulate, viz., that wheresoever the head could pass, there the whole person could pass. It needs not to be said, that, in the final experiment, this absurd rule was found not to hold good. The king stuck fast about the chest and shoulders, and was extricated ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the East there was no incentive for the Christians to try to prove the existence of God, for the philosophy of that portion of the world was essentially religious in its character, and based its speculation on the existence of God as a fundamental postulate of revelation and of reason as well. In the combination of Judaism and Hellenic philosophy made by the "Hellenizing Jews" and by the "Judaizing Hellenes," the existence of God was admitted quite as freely, and maintained quite as zealously, as by the Christians themselves, ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... be protected because a man by taking possession of an object has brought it within the sphere of his will. He has extended his personality into or over that object. As Hegel would have said, possession is the objective realization of free will. And by Kant's postulate, the will of any individual thus manifested is entitled to absolute respect from every other individual, and can only be overcome or set aside by the universal will, that is, by the state, acting ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... manifestations which begin as tribal, end, in the course of time, by becoming racial. We cannot account for the differentiation of mankind into distinct races, nor the existence of many intermediate forms which link one human race to another, unless we postulate the existence in mankind of ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... little farm I have acquired in a sleepy locality on the south coast. There I hope to be spared for some few years to develop the economic products of the honey-bee, to meditate on the Universal Postulate, and to watch, from afar, my children cultivating the difficult fields of Experience. May their task be easier than ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... a mistake to jump to the conclusion that this degeneracy had as yet gone too far to be arrested. It was assuredly not that degeneracy of senility which Mr. Balfour is inclined to postulate as an explanation of decadence. So far as I can judge, the Romans were at that stage when, in spite of unhealthy conditions of life and obstinate persistence in dangerous habits, it was not too late to reform and recover. To me the main interest ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... character, the purity and sublimity of his moral precepts, the eloquence of his inculcations, the beauty of the apologues in which he conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes, indeed, needing indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Some postulate a sinless Eden past, before this killing habit began; and foresee a sinless Millennium to come, when we shall have outgrown it. These do not use their imaginations enough. Even if Edenic or Millennial tigers could digest grass and apples, are they therefore immortal? Is ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
